ABSTRACT
The ultimate goal for soware metrics is to help soware profes-sionals (be they developers, testers, managers, or maintainers) make decisions under uncertainty. As explained so far, we are ultimately interested in knowing things like how much eort and time will be required to produce a system to a particular set of requirements, how much more testing will be needed before the system has suciently few bugs, how much eort can we save by using some particular tool, etc. All of these decisions involve uncertainty, risk, and trade-os. Whereas the other chapters in this book provide the tools for identifying and collecting the specic metrics to capture the underlying attributes involved in these problems, this chapter focuses on how to incorporate these metrics into a rational decision-making framework.
